Category Archives: PowerCLI

I was asked to find a solution to automate importing OS customization Specs to our Vcenters. Its a task that not difficult but better if was scripted. I found this code located at ForwardorReverse blog. Export function allows you to export the OS customization Spec to $secname.xml and the import allows you to import them. These two functions are few years old according to the Blog but still work on Vsphere 6.5 without issue.

So I was building out a 44 node vSAN cluster last week and I ran into an issue where 12 of the ESXi hosts had their own network Partition group different than the other 32. I had no issues with the vSAN network, I was able to use vmkping every server so there was no communication issue with any of the hosts in the cluster via the vSAN kernel. In most cases vSAN Network partitioning occurs when there was issue with vSAN kernel communicating with other hosts.

After several attempts of removing the diskgroups, removing vSAN kernel, moving out of cluster and away from DVS then back I had no luck. I knew based on VMware supported Maximum that I could create a 64 node vSAN cluster. I was at a loss so after several hours troubleshooting and Google searching I ended up opening a SR with VMware after about hour or so troubleshooting the VMware engineer was at loss until he found an article that indicates that you must create some advanced settings on the ESXi hosts in order to see above 32 nodes and once we made those settings rebooted the hosts we had a single network partition our issue was resolved.

The KB article (2110081) shows how to perform task via esxcli via SSH logged into root but does not show how to do it via PowerCli.

You would think that supported maximums would occur out of box but according to VMware they did not want smaller vSAN cluster to sacrifice memory overhead that would be required for larger vSAN clusters to run efficiently.

Can across situation where I needed to move VM from one Vcenter to another.

The following script will do the following:
Will prompt for a Source and Target Vcenter and then ask for user credentials.
Connect to the Source and Target Vcenter. When then cycle through VMs listed from csv file (VMList.csv). (Place the csv file in same directory as the script.)

The list of VMs in the One by one and Migrate the VM to new VC. If the VMs powered on will attempt to shutdown the Server (if VMtools installed) and t

Ran into situation where I needed to reboot a full cluster of ESXi hosts. In most cases when I need to reboot Cluster full of hosts I would utilize VUM (VMware Update Manager) to use VMware DRS to move VMs off the host, place the host in maintenance mode, reboot host and when host completes the reboot take server back out of maintenance mode, then move to next host and does for each host in cluster.

I did not need to patch the hosts this time. And Since the cluster had 32 hosts and several VMs I did not want to do this by hand. So used google and was found this script that I wanted to share. I wish I could give credit to the creator but the was on in an archived word press blog.

The script does the following:
Goes through the cluster one host at a time and puts ESXi server maintenance mode, reboots the server and the puts it back online. If VMs are running on the host DRS will need to be enabled in fully automated mode to allow VMs to VMotion off to other hosts (There should also be enough HA capacity in cluster to have 1 host taken offline at a time.